Mauro Boianovsky on Samuelsonian Dynamics and the Economic Analysis of Market Processes

In his article “Paul Samuelson’s Ways to Macroeconomic Dynamics” Mauro Boianovsky has provided an account of the evolution of Samuelson’s attempts to construct a dynamic theory that, because of Samuelson’s centrality to modern economics, verges on being an account of the history of recent thought on the subject. This paper argues that Samuelson’s views should be related not only to the formal dynamic modeling of Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen but also to the verbal accounts of dynamics and market processes found in work by Alfred Marshall, John Maurice Clark, Edward Chamberlin, and Joseph Schumpeter that he had studied very carefully. Broadening our perspective in this way helps make sense of some otherwise puzzling features of Samuelson’s economics.